Carlos Reichenbach: Relatorio confidencial (2010) - full transcript
- Okay?
- Okay, you can go.
Let's start.
Your name, please.
My name is
Carlos Oscar Reichenbach Filho.
I was born in
Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre.
But I came to São Paulo
practically with 4 months.
I was born practically by chance.
A little before my due time.
I was born on
June 14th 1945.
Impressions of that
Rua Tão Augusta, or
(A short introduction to the world
of the "augustiniense man")
It was Luiz Sérgio Persson, as a teacher
who found, from the very first moment
right in the first semester,
I remember very clearly.
He said one day in class,
the only one who's going to be a filmmaker
is going to be that fat guy
with glasses there.
I even looked back!
I didn't think I was fat.
And he said like this,
"if you want your scripts filmed,
learn how to direct."
And that, was the great stimulus
to the art of filmmaking,
It was via Persson.
It was Persson who put it into my head
that I should be a director.
I said to Persson,
"I have a very big problem,
I'm very shy.
I don't like people, I have a problem
in relating to a lot of people."
"But that, you can learn."
"That you can learn."
He was very passionate.
A fantastic figure,
extremely passionate.
"You have to stop being blasé."
Then he discovered that I wasn't blasé,
I was shy.
"You have to go to the street, get drunk,
get some women at the Boca do Lixo."
He was very direct.
He carried everybody to the premieres,
it was a horror.
He carried us to watch
All the Women in the World,
at the previews.
We left at night there
with Dionisio Oliveira.
Both of us stuffing our faces.
Anyway, he said,
"You're going to direct a short film."
That's fine.
"Then we'll start development,
I'll give you some cans of negative.
We'll call Oswaldo Oliveira,
teach you a little bit of photography."
It started out with his team,
to help us.
Glauco Mirko Laurelli
accompanied the editing.
That was the team he worked with.
I told Persson, "I hate documentaries,
I'm not going to do a documentary.
I don't know how to do that."
He would say,
"Yes, you will."
"Do some research.
Take an easy subject,
something Paulista.
Do something nearby."
And so Rua Augusta was born.
"Make a film about Augusta Street."
I don't like documentaries,
nor do I like Augusta Street.
And now I’m going to make
a documentary about Augusta Street...
That's how the documentary was born,
he produced it.
This street is so commercial.
But then I discovered an
absolutely fascinating person.
He was the one who gave me the key
to be able to make this documentary.
It was a figure,
a kind of iconic figure,
those that always interested me,
the marginal figures.
There was a primitivist painter,
who lived in Augusta Street,
exhibiting a painting
absolutely blasphemous.
He was Waldomiro de Deus.
He painted Our Lady in a miniskirt,
Christ in swimwear...
Priests with little boots.
He did a mixture of religious things,
But during the present days.
He used to walk down Augusta Street
wearing a miniskirt!
What a fantastic figure.
And there, in fact, I found the key
to what this film could be.
We were making it with tips,
negative leftovers.
We shot some nonsense
in Augusta Street.
But the things that caught my attention.
We were lying prostrate in Rua Augusta
with the camera stopped,
and then a guy dressed as an Arab appears,
looking like a Tuareg.
On top of a van.
The guy making some signs
down the Rua Augusta.
What an aggressive thing,
what a violent thing.
In that place,
it looked like a scary thing.
Ask the guy to take a turn here,
and we filmed the phenomenal journey
of this strange figure.
This Arab, who should be in Bom Retiro
and not here on Augusta Street.
This figure, drifting there in the middle.
That was going on,
this search for drifting figures.
Let's take the most modern nightclub
of the time, which was Inferninho.
A place where the exceptional
figures of the time would mingle.
There was a crazy queer dancing there,
he was a fantastic figure.
There was an aggressiveness in there,
in the middle of Augusta Street.
A guy mumbling
like a madman in there.
These are the figures for me
that were absolutely fascinating.
The film was made like this,
in that completely
uncharacterized street,
already very mercantilist,
by those figures on the margin.
That's what got me excited about filming.
This film, when seen today
with the proper distance,
is a film about Waldomiro de Deus.
About this difficulty
of rising out of the nest.
This street is so womanly.
The film was made like this,
Saturdays and Sundays, when Persson
made the camera available to us,
the negative ends.
So I centralized the action of the thing
on the stimulus of Waldomiro de Deus.
Who I think was the most
interesting figure in the region.
Absolutely interesting,
who was later to become an icon.
He left, went to France, and has now become
one of our greatest artists.
Of the primitivist painters in Brazil.
The most important.
We stopped filming
and nothing happened.
Then Persson asked,
when are you going to finish this film?
And I said we had no money
to finish the film.
"Then I will raise some money,
so you can finish the film.
But then you'll have to finish it anyway."
This happened a year and a half
after I left the São Luiz School.
After neither he nor I
were at São Luiz.
"But you have to finish it,
there is all the material filmed."
Two years later, I opened a company
called Xanadú Productions,
with Callegaro and Antônio Lima.
I said, "Lima, come here.
Take a look at my material,
and help me write a text,
as official as possible."
We are going to make a documentary
like Primo Carbonari.
That was the contradiction of the thing...
it was not in a mocking way.
It was like a parallel reading
to those images that were filmed.
I was editing with Jovita Pereira Dias
who had been Glauco's assistant.
We didn't have the money
to pay an editor of that caliber.
So we took the assistant,
Jovita was the one who rode with me.
I was editing Audácia!
my episode in that film,
"The Balladissima of the Tropics
X The Sex Picks".
Which you screened.
"Jovita, come finish the film,
because Persson is on my leg
and I have to finish it."
I made a quick arrangement with her.
Because the film ended up
winning the first State Government
competition for short films,
which still exists today.
Do you know what it is?
We were the first class to get it,
plus the post-production.
So I was able to pay Jovita,
pay the lab, you know?
I remember asking,
"I want to get the narrator
with the most powerful voice.
Who is Primo Carbonari's narrator?
Ah, Oswaldo Calfat.
Is he there?
Then call Oswaldo Calfat."
Oswaldo came to read the text,
and I said:
"Read this in the most institutional
way as possible."
The elegant stores,
the high commerce,
the sophistication,
the elegance of the people.
They make this street
the place where you mix
eccentric types,
not always of the upper bourgeoisie,
with their usual occupation.
Window shopping.
Keeping up with fashion.
Not always buying.
Having tea.
Meeting Ricardo
with his new girlfriend.
The movie takes this tone.
Which is a tone of irony.
It gets more serious as
towards the end.
And it sets the idea when
Waldomiro de Deus leaves Brazil.
I think, in a certain way,
the end of Esta Rua tão Augusta
defines the end of my next films.
They all end with people leaving.
If they don't end, in a certain way they
define themselves by people leaving.
On June 15, 1969,
Waldomiro de Deus traveled to Europe.
Taking as luggage his
irreverent painting.
I myself underestimated this film
for many years.
I regarded it as a chance film.
It had no importance.
And it ended up taking on an importance,
not for me, but because
it is perhaps one of the few
documents about this region,
at that time.
For me its importance, was in being
somewhat premonitory
in relation to the disappearance
of these exceptional figures.
It's very difficult today for you
to find such a persona.
Interesting personas and,
at the same time,
as drifting as Waldomiro de Deus.
This indifferent street.
To the painter, to the painter's paintings.
To the mini-skirt of the painter.
To the painter's life.
To the painter's friends.
This street that snobs
the painter's painting.
A painter who paints
Christs in miniskirts.
Saints in monokinis.
Popes in shorts.
Friars wearing modern boots.
Parties in heaven and on earth.
You will see the result
of nine months of work,
spent in the creation of the great
cinematographic impact of the year.
LILIAN M.
Lilian M. is what I consider
my second feature film.
Until 1970,
I had made two episodes
and two feature films.
Alice in "As Libertinas" and
"As Baladíssimas dos Trópicos"
X As Picaretas do Sexo, in "Audácia!"
Which I don't think are feature films,
they are episodes.
They are almost short films.
I didn't define...
I always say that, for me,
at that moment,
especially after I left São Luiz,
life and cinema are very mixed.
I thought that living was
more important than making films.
Experimenting.
In August, 1974,
in the studios of Jota Filmes,
director Carlos Reichenbach
and his team
were looking for the ideal actress for
the title role of their new film.
I became partner in an
advertising production company.
The advertising service Jota Filmes.
Which has an interesting practical side.
Good. Nice.
It gave me a lot of technical practice.
It was the moment when I refined
my knowledge as a cinematographer.
When I started at São Luiz
I didn't know how to deal with people properly.
I learned this in practice,
especially working with teams.
Leading teams.
Sometimes as a director,
sometimes as a director of photography.
Commanding teams,
I learned the delights of a drifter's life.
Of community life.
And bringing into practice
a bit of my world's political vision.
How, in fact, to take the whole
anarcho-libertarian character,
the libertarian thought, and bring it
to coexistence, to daily life.
To experience it on a daily basis.
The practice of putting order
without being noticed.
Without it becoming a fetter,
an unpleasant thing.
And advertising was the first world
in which I could not bring
this notion into my daily life.
Lilian M.
I had wanted to make a film,
a few years earlier
that would be a kind of a Justine,
that would start from this idea
of a woman who
passed from hand to hand,
that would transform herself
as she passed through each man.
As if she took the diary
of a chambermaid.
It had a bit of a Buñuelesque
thing going on.
But it was still a project,
not developed as a script.
As always, I start first
at the treatment, or pre-script level,
where things start to be defined.
But one thing I have been stimulating
from very early on
even in my screenwriting courses,
that is never to worry
developing the pre-script.
without focusing on the dialogues
in order not to waste time.
Which is a very curious thing.
Because, for example, "Lilian M."
won the award for best screenplay
and it is a film that in truth
had no script, it had a pre-script.
Just like "Anjos do Arrabalde",
a kind of crazy thing.
Films that won
the Best Screenplay Award,
and were shot with a pre-script.
Well defined in the pre-script.
I defined the whole episode.
I knew what conditions I had,
and I had to write
for those conditions.
I know that it is a film
that will be made in blocks.
This week I have this negative
and this crew to shoot.
The next week and so on...
So the first block,
is this woman in the countryside.
The second block is her coexistence
with the industrialist.
The third block is her coexistence
with the torturer.
And it was developed this way.
And it was filmed this way too.
I filmed for five days,
and stopped for three, four weeks.
Then I would come back.
What did I need?
I needed an actress.
I needed an actress
who would be at my disposal
during those two, three, four months
that I was going to shoot the film.
And that was the big search that I went for.
On the recommendation of
my old friend and colleague,
actor in"As Libertinas",
José Carlos Cardoso,
also an actor in "A Mulher de Todos".
Theater actress Celia Olga Benvenutti
was the only candidate who fulfilled
all the requirements for the role.
He told me about an actress
who was considered
one of the best students
at the school of dramatic art,
Celia Olga Benvenutti.
I said okay, but I wanted to
do some tests with her.
I had already understood that
to make that film, I had to do everything.
Be a photographer,
camera operator, etc and so on.
This film was made with a
leftover family inheritance.
Leftover negative material.
I wanted to hire this woman,
do the tests and so on.
And then I realized really
I had a gold nugget in my hand.
Are you a little nervous, Miss...?
Lilian.
Would you like a cigarette?
- No, thank you.
- Please, this will calm you down.
I had to have a genius actress.
Although for the male characters,
I have actors in the film.
What I essentially wanted
was to work with a few guys.
The German industrialist, for example,
was a film director
and director of photography,
Edward Freund.
And the guy who played the salesman
was an actor,
but essentially a voice actor, in Eliot Ness,
in Robert Stack's "The Untouchables".
The business today, my dear,
is land, land, real estate.
Wilson Ribeiro, excellent.
I called an almost relative,
he was practically raised as a cousin,
a person with whom I sympathized,
who got along well with my parents,
Benjamin Cattan.
A great friend.
I called Benjamin to do the industrial.
I would rather have a thug at home
than a dancer son.
It was the stepmother's fault.
The guy who plays the farmer,
was one of the best
camera assistants in São Paulo,
who should be an actor,
was Caçador Guerreiro.
With Walter Marins,
Wilson Ribeiro,
with Cattan,
you could be more explicit
in a certain sense.
I used to ask, really exaggerate things.
I remember speaking
with Walter Martins,
"Now you are Zé Trindade.
"Now I am talking to a guy
who likes chanchada."
Who is an actor with an eminently
Brechtian formation.
So you can have a
completely different relationship.
One that extrapolates.
- Did you rent?
- I rented.
But you have to buy.
- Money is never left over.
- But it has to.
What a beautiful chuchu orchard.
Chuchu!
It is a sign, not a character,
it's a sign.
Now mix it with chanchada.
We are going to go crazy for real here.
Let's become Zé Trindade.
Where are the women!
Where are the women, get it?
That debauched thing.
Where is Mr. Jose?
He's not here, young man.
He’s really not here?
No, sir.
There are actors who are
essentially movie actors,
like Sergio Hingst.
Would you move in with me?
Will you take care of life?
If you promise
not to impregnate me.
But I want to have children.
I'd give them my name.
You're such a poor man.
Come here.
Biáfora's favorite actor,
who has this image
that makes a big impression,
which is Biáfora's room.
That underling,
the civil servant
par excellence.
The subservient figure,
almost mediocre that,
at the same time, has a strength.
In contrast with the
wonderful character,
who is the extraordinary actress,
Maracy Mello.
Maracy Mello was an actress
essentially of cinema.
An actress with a cinema discipline.
Who also had this strength.
She had to have something kind of...
She was a character who worked a lot
the question of death.
She had a physical connection with death.
It was essential to find
an almost Japanese actress.
With a transparency, right?
A translucence.
I really wanted
this character of the sister
of the civil servant
to be this link to dead things.
That it was a character that suddenly
is being calcified along with the house.
But at the same time she doesn't age.
She keeps her features
as if she were still a girl.
Those almost youthful features.
In the eyes you can see a maturity,
but the rest of her features are as if
she was preserved in formaldehyde.
Especially the texts are too long,
it had to have a mournful tone.
As if on the outside she is fine with life
but inside she is dead.
There was strange warmth that, sometimes,
in the late afternoon, appeared.
The prayers that my late aunt
on her deathbed,
before she stopped believing in God.
To drive away the devil.
Of the bricks that looked like bones.
A character who had
a fascist nostalgia, the industrialist,
who had an anguish for death.
And another who has a fascination with it.
Without being an obvious thing.
I think this was something
that the actors also brought.
That was the essential choice.
I remember it was fascinating
to film this, too.
The assistants were absolutely
fascinated by that character.
Walking through the house
as if she was an apparition.
And the house is really hers,
The other one feels more and more
on the margins of that house.
That was an essential thing in the film.
She was a stranger in there,
a stranger who remains
a stranger until the end.
Until they sting each other,
in which she says that
she doesn't belong in this world.
If I belong, I'll become a zombie.
Like this woman
so young and so dead.
The good actor doesn't hunch,
the good actor gives you an allowance.
An extra to work with.
He doesn't go the other way.
He takes your path
and goes forward.
He doesn't back down,
nor does he go sideways.
I think that this is a collaboration.
When I was a cinematographer
I was very conscious of this.
I didn't go filming for myself.
I always tried to find
the chromatic taste of the client.
I would show films, pictures, paintings.
"Do you like this blue?
Is it the blue you imagined?"
I filmed the first part, the whole part
involving her on the farm,
and at the end of the film also,
which goes around.
Then we shot the Cattan part,
then we filmed the part
of the German industrialist,
and finally the part with Sérgio Hingst.
That was the last part, inclusive.
The last segment.
And as we were filming,
me and Inácio Araújo...
Inácio Araújo was the editor of the film,
and a great friend of mine.
He started working in editing
as an assistant.
The first film he made
as an editing assistant
was "Corrida em Busca do Amor".
In that period we became very good friends.
We would take the film,
shoot the first part
and already pre-edited it.
So if you miss something
you would still have time to do it.
The creation of the film does not end
at the end of the shooting.
Even on the last day of mixing
I can change the whole film.
I am open to tinkering
with the whole film.
If it's necessary.
The editor, for me
is not just a complement,
it is an essential part.
For me, perhaps the second
most important thing in a film.
This is the moment when I need
a person of extreme confidence.
A person in whom I trust completely.
To tell me, too much is too much.
It's either too little or too much.
Inácio used to say,
we wrote many scripts together,
that, in fact, his function
was to bring me down to earth.
“Let Carlão fly and
I'll pull him down when he starts.”
“If I let him, he'll go.”
You don't want to change that name?
How about Paula?
I don't like it.
Alice.
Horrible.
How about Silvia?
No.
What was your mother's name?
My mother? Lilian.
No, not that one.
You're not going to name yourself Lilian.
There were some great things that
were never included in the film.
In the final cut of the film.
The participation of Jairo Ferreira
was remarkable.
He played a sailor.
He played a sailor who spoke
with an onomatopoeic language.
He spoke only in noises.
As he did that language
subtitles would come in.
As if it were a translation
of another language.
That was a wonderful idea,
that later... This was filmed!
At that time they didn't make
a colored editing copy.
The films were edited
in black and white.
You only saw the color film
when the first copy came out.
The only thing that you,
as a cinematographer, received
were two frames from each scene.
These were guides with which
you had control over the film.
It was very crazy.
Because of this there were
very curious things that happened.
Which obviously had
to be solved during editing.
There was a set that
was set up in the studio,
for which called a motel decorator.
"Decorate this here like
if it were a nice motel."
A lot of the industrialist part
was filmed on this set.
I already had the bathroom ready,
so we tinkered with the set.
We were filming with advertising junk.
I needed those scenes.
Those four years of torture,
of coexistence, taught me
how to deal with the structure of a studio.
The last script decisions
were made according
to the resources I had.
So a lot of things, for example...
When I had a great actor,
a guy who could memorize
a text like no one else,
like Cattan,
a trained actor like him,
I would put a text in his hand.
These texts were sometimes
defined overnight.
Because what I found provocative
was to have an almost minimalist character,
who almost doesn't speak,
a female character,
who lets herself be involved
in the male discourse.
The film starts with a woman
who doesn't talk with her husband.
She works, fucks, sleeps,
wakes up, works...
They have that dynamic,
they don't talk,
they touch each other with their clothes on,
they have sex with clothes on.
The husband doesn't know his wife's body.
He gets to know it in the end,
she is the one who subverts it.
When that guy arrives talking nonstop,
that traveling salesman.
Then, obviously, I got a good actor,
Walter Marins.
An actor with an academic background.
Then I said, detonate the text here.
I'll give you the lines inside,
but you improvise.
I couldn't define it.
There was a certain moment,
which was great,
now you will have
to make a synthesis,
of the fascination of capitalism.
Then I took an informative text,
like real estate banking.
Memorize this here.
The synthesis of capitalist brutality.
But of course it will get better.
Now, because of the treatment
that you have given me,
I'm really not going to leave here
without selling you something.
- I'm not buying anything.
- But you don't have to worry.
You give a small part in
small part in cash.
And the rest in chuchu.
There were things that were added
at the time of the shooting.
For example,
I thought that the famous
Ruy Barbosa's famous speech
was a synthesis, you know?
I still know this text today.
I got a book to get to
know this text better.
The text that made this guy
the best orator of the country.
This guy in the sauna pissing off
everybody that is next to him.
Memorize this text, speak this text,
while stretching here,
waiting to be served.
"No!
Brazil is not the clubbing, gambling
and of pandering to the livestock farmers,
who have seized its fortune,
and want to treat it the way libertinism
treats the momentary
companions of their lust."
No!
Brazil is not this collective
collective gathering of perverted creatures,
that you can run over,
without the slightest impression,
the breath of the aspirations
that agitate humanity.
No!
Brazil is not this nationality
cold, delirious, cadaverous
Which receives on its forehead
the stamp of a clique.
As the tattoo of the lover,
or the chalet, on the back,
the fleur-de-lis of the executioner.
That's a text I've memorized.
It was done overnight.
I had to have actors who knew
how to memorize the text.
That was by meter.
I wanted the character of Cattan
to be an industrialist in crisis.
An Industrialist with a crisis of conscience.
What's worse...
Who does the whole surplus value speech.
In our case, for example,
despite our philanthropy.
Of our voluntary contributions,
of our civic spirit.
We put in a great part of our effort
working for the national economy.
The nation works thanks to
to our financial funds.
And leave some characters
extremely laconic.
The German Industrialist, for example,
he hardly speaks.
He only says slurs in German.
I dubbed them, by the way,
because I couldn't
afford a German dubber.
But how I have heard this
during my whole life.
I just kept repeating it.
Did you sign any papers,
any documents?
Yes, including some deeds.
And then you took some?
I made the down payment.
I told you not to sign anything,
not to pay anything.
But what am I going to do?
He is irresistible.
What is the book that synthesizes
modern consumerist thought?
The philosophy of getting along.
Something that already
bothered at that time.
Indisputably, Dale Carnegie.
"How to Make Friends
and Influence People."
So I took a summary of that book,
I did it overnight.
And I gave it to Wilson Ribeiro,
"Are you happy?
Being happy is an art.
Being happy is like tanning leather,
polishing a diamond..."
The bullshit that is in this book
that sold more than potato water.
More than rice and parties.
The question of so-called positive thinking.
- Are you happy?
- Once in a while.
Being happy is an art.
And you have to practice it.
Being happy is like tanning leather,
polishing a diamond...
And the way to deal with it consists in...
It became
an accumulation of ideologies.
And this woman going
from man to man.
Until she fell into the hands of a bureaucrat.
A civil servant.
Everything regulated inside,
who has a strange coexistence
with his morbid sister.
That woman who leanerd a lot and
went through everything on this journey,
with every man she lived
a borderline experience,
this woman returns to the farm.
She comes back to see her husband's body.
She makes her husband discover his body
and then takes the road again.
Because she can't stay there.
We were going through
a period of censorship.
Very though.
What I feared the censorship
was going to cut
was on the character of the German.
There was no parameter
with the censorship.
And you agreed with all this, Lilian?
But I didn't understand these things.
At that time I thought that a trick,
should be paid with a bigger one.
Do you remember, man?
We covered it.
That industrialist who disappeared.
Yeah, Hartman disappeared.
Funny how time
makes us forget things.
That character was totally inspired
inspired by Henning Albert Boilesen.
A German who finances
the torture apparatus in Brazil.
I could only show that as a metaphor.
Otherwise the film would be
banned immediately.
But it was a very clear metaphor.
I had spectators who had passed
by his hands and said, "That's Boilesen."
For anyone who knew the figure,
it's crystal clear.
Although Boilesen doesn't appear,
there is no mention of DOPS or anything.
There is a certain moment that...
I didn't film it outside the DOPS
because it was too blatant.
The German industrialist orders
the torture of the squatter inside.
Any good connoisseur
will understand that.
Don't do this to me, no!
Orson Welles said that he couldn't
separate politics from crime.
I have a more of a Marcusian view.
I couldn't separate politics from sex.
I film the body to show the soul.
I think "Lilian M." is a summary of this.
Seen today it is even a prudish film.
I didn't dare that much.
Maybe the most daring sequence,
not from a political point of view,
but in terms of nudity,
is the orgy with the father and son.
With the mistress in bed.
In fact, it is a lesson
the boy teaches his father.
It's a really aggressive thing,
it was on purpose.
It was meant to shock, to punch
the audience in the stomach.
But it is the only moment
that I feel in the film
that censorship could touch or not,
and it did.
12 years later,
the BBC in London
bans the torture part.
What...
What did they do?
With me?
My morals!
Where are my morals!
My morals!
It made sense deep down
to work with metaphors.
Although they were clear metaphors,
but they were metaphors.
For example, the prostitution class
is not a prostitution class.
It is a dance class.
Now you are going to learn
those Latin rhythms.
The conga!
And I don't know what else.
It is time for Brazil to play
the Hawaiian rhythm.
The most ridiculous thing ever.
The two women in Hawaiian clothes,
with the notion that this is Brazil.
More metaphorical
than that is impossible.
The musical vision is already
there in advance.
I shoot thinking with the music.
I didn't do this in
"Corrida em Busca do Amor".
Because I didn't have the conditions for it.
But when I made "Lilian M."
half of the film was shot with the music.
Live and in color.
Jairo Ferreira used to say
something very funny.
"Carlão makes films to exorcise the hundreds
of records he inherited from his father."
It was all filmed with playback.
There was no direct sound.
Everything was filmed with playback.
Half of the film was shot with playback.
Half of the film.
I took a Nagra there
and released the music on the spot.
I would use a Nagra, a little sound box.
And we film like that. Why?
Actually, I learned very early on,
especially with "Lilian M."
where I could put that into practice,
is that even my chief machinist
did great travelling shots.
And I love a travelling shot.
Cinema is travelling for me.
He does it within the rhythm.
So the truth is that since
"Corrida em Busca do Amor"
many sequences have been conceived
in the relationship between
image and soundtrack.
There is a whole sequence
that I made sure to do
almost as a joke
with the ending of "O Anjo Nasceu"
by Julio Bressane.
The guy has just closed
a deal with this woman.
He sells her a
squatted piece of land.
He goes out dancing with her,
gets in the car, drives away.
He goes to Conchinchina.
The music goes on and on and on.
If you that the music out
that scene becomes unbearable.
But it was filmed with that music.
It had to end with the last chord.
Because the rhythm of the music
determines the tempo of the scene.
It's the movement of the music.
Optical sound had its limitations.
At the time of the mix,
some sounds disappeared.
That is, it was recorded, it was mixed.
For example, the scene of the crash
between the car and the truck.
I never heard that sound.
Because in the optic that sound was gone.
The sound was so loud,
that it exceeded the limit of the optical.
When you took the magnetic
and transported it to the optical,
you put a limit.
We put a limiter.
Anything that goes past that limiter,
it cuts out.
It doesn't register.
Until today I never heard the crash.
It's that the music comes on top,
that's what saved the scene.
Dona Maria, he's a criminal!
Your husband is a scoundrel.
An asshole.
A piece of shit who doesn't
understand anything about life.
- Your husband is a lowlife.
- Shut up!
Shut up, you're dead,
I'm in charge here.
Now, who's ever seen a man
let his children go hungry.
He's a turd.
Shut up!
Who are you to tell me to shut up?
Shut up, you're dead!
I'm in charge here.
José!
José!
Dona Maria, don't do this, for God's sake.
I want to go away.
I want my children.
I want to go away.
The biggest influence for this film,
comes from the Japanese directors.
This film, in fact...
What moved me to make this film
was my passion for Shohei Imamura.
And other Japanese filmmakers,
like Eizō Sugawa
Who are filmmakers of reference,
of my background.
But it was Shohei Imamura especially.
With "Insect Woman", "Secrets of a Wife"...
And a director, who was considered one of the
most feminine directors in Japanese cinema,
Yoshio Yoshida.
And also Yasuzo Massumura.
Yasuzo Massumura made films
about the feminine universe,
especially the universe of women
exploited by men.
Prostitutes, factory workers, etc.
There was this thing of seeking
the maximum dignity in these lives.
Based on an economic
and carnal aspect.
Massumura said something fantastic,
that guided "Lilian M." a lot.
There is one thing that
we cannot forget, he said.
That greatly influences
the feminine vision of the world.
More than in men,
in the feminine experience,
in all important female experience,
blood is present.
The menstruation, the birth,
the abortion, you know?
Very curious to think about that.
Only a Japanese to think about it.
This was kind of defining for me in the film.
More than the question of desire,
evidently I'm talking about it and of the body,
the discovery of the body.
This character gradually discovers that
little by little she has a body.
That this body is also part of her, even if
she has not perceived clearly,
it was already part of
her connection with the farmer.
This guilty relationship with the body.
That it becomes explicit in this
coexistence with other men.
At some moments, being used even
as a guinea pig in torture experiments.
There's a line where she literally says,
"Two shocks, two checks."
Everything comes in with
a money relationship in between.
She goes from
luxury prostitution to the streets.
But she always comes out with
integrity of these relationships.
That's the greatness of Massumura's films.
This dive into experience.
This is nothing new in this film for me.
The character in "Alma Corsária"
is similar to Lilian.
The poet in "Alma Corsária" is just like Lilian.
He gets into every problem
in the movie, to learn more.
That is the keynote of several other films.
The blonde in "Falsa Loura".
The mixed-race girl in "Garotas do ABC".
These are characters that get involved
without fear of making a mistake.
And did the box office do well?
At that time, there was something
that was essential for the existence of the
of the so-called average Brazilian cinema.
That was the additional box-office prize.
The film had more than 500 thousand spectators.
What any average Brazilian film
did at the time.
Any average Brazilian film
in the 1970s had 500,000 viewers.
But for me, the first financial return came
by that additional box-office prize.
Because any film that did up to
500 thousand spectators received it.
I lived on that Additional Box Office
for practically two years.
Films that did at least 500,000,
because you had films that did 6 million.
You have two movies that did that.
Yes, yes.
You don't have much comparison
today in relation to this.
Doing 500,000
spectators at the time
is today more than a million.
Deep down, you don't have
many parameters of comparison.
I repeat, the ticket cost
the same as a bus ticket.
The C class frequented
Brazilian cinema with assiduity.
And that's what ended.
"Lilian M. Confissões amorosas,
relatório confidencial"
Nothing was forbidden to her.
And she knew and dared
everything.
Don't miss it.
Carlão, what about the
short films you released?
All Brazilian short films
had to accompany a foreign film.
The choices were very crazy.
Everybody was waiting that their
short film would go with a Spielberg.
A short that, I don't know,
would be with Empire of the Sun.
And there was a profit,
the films were profitable.
So that's why some producers
began to produce short films.
And then I was invited by Galante
to make some short films.
"Don't you want to make some short films?"
“Sonhos de Vida”.
“Sangue Corsário”
“Nem verdade nem mentira”.
And “M da minha Mão”.
The “M da minha Mão” I don't call it a film,
I call it a filmed testimony.
Mário Gennari Filho,
what was your first success?
"Casinha pequenina",
in Baião rhythm.
When was it recorded?
1950.
Can you tell me
who is the author of this song?
This music is public domain.
Unknown author.
Mário Gennari Filho was a composer
fundamental in my childhood.
Mine and Jairo Ferreira's childhood.
It was also a childhood in the periphery,
periphery of the time.
I was raised in Jabaquara.
Jabaquara at the time
was understood as periphery.
And I used to go to the
amusement park in the periphery
I used to go to amusement parks
that had a huge loudspeaker.
"João offers to Mariazinha from the pharmacy,
the "M da minha Mão", by Mário Gennari Filho."
It was a song of my childhood.
And of my life in the periphery,
for many years.
Not only that music, but especially
the accordion instrument.
The instrument that made
so successful in the 1950s
and was despised in the 1960s.
The accordion is Luiz Gonzaga's
instrument, let's not forget.
You can never despise it.
Talking with Nelson
in one of those debates
that the greatest influence he had in his life
was Luiz Gonzaga. For me too.
I spent my whole childhood listening to
Luiz Gonzaga, Mário Gennari Filho, Mário Zan.
The accordion was the instrument
that was part of my childhood.
It is part of all my films.
All my films have at least one song
played on an accordion.
The accordion was the instrument
that was part of my education.
- What kind of audience you had?
- The youth.
The youth of that time.
Maybe the youth now
no longer accept this.
At that time it was hit music.
I wanted to detect what was
the atmosphere of his compositions.
At that time, all kinds of audiences
liked this music.
There was no rock, no disco,
nothing like that.
So the youth loved this kind of music,
Bolero, Baião...
"M da minha Mão"
is a filmed testimony.
Because of Jairo Ferreira.
The conception is mine,
but the interviewer is Jairo.
I was filming.
He asks a lot of questions.
What was the first success...
In fact, Mário Gennari Filho became known
as a musician and performer,
playing "A Casinha Pequenina".
- Can we hear a little piece?
- Of course.
He composed some classics
of that time, like "Baião Caçula".
"Velho Romance."
And "M da minha Mão",
which made a big impression on me.
So I made a point
to buy the rights to the song
when I went to do "Dois Córregos".
In "Dois Córregos" the record even appears.
It is a tribute.
It's been almost 30 years, do you
still remember "M da minha Mão"?
Yes, how can I not?
It is the only document that exists about
this great Paulista composer.
That is Mário Gennari Filho.
Who composed some of the most beautiful
and essential pieces of the Brazilian chorinho.
"Baião Caçula" is a classic.
And I managed to record it
while he was still alive.
It didn't win the short film certificate
because Mário Gennari appears
playing in a nightclub.
I wanted to show him today, alive.
So at the end of the film there is a thanks
to the restaurant where he was a partner.
There is no publicity, The name
of the restaurant doesn't appear.
Everything was a reason
for them to veto it.
And that is why the film
was never shown in theaters.
It was never seen.
His son and daughter
have never seen the film.
I met his children,
when I released "Dois Córregos".
When did the accordion start to become
become an outdated instrument?
About 15 years ago.
More or less.
Although I think
it is coming back again.
What are the reasons for this?
The reasons for coming back?
Today they are creating new sounds.
The accordion has been for a long time
without having any opportunity.
Today the accordion has something
that can be taken advantage of.
If there is something important about this film,
it is that it is the only record of Mario Gennari alive.
Active,
and performing his pearls.
Perhaps "Sangue Corsário" is the first film
made in Brazil about the counterculture.
Bringing out the beatnik poetry.
The avant-garde poetry.
The blasphemous poetry,
the strong poetry,
of a great friend.
The poet Orlando Parolini.
He was an actor in some of my films.
As well as theater actor. Playwright.
He had a theater group that was very
connected to the dramaturgy of Ionesco.
To the theater of the absurd.
In fact, the group was called Ab Surdo.
A whole life hanging.
Galleries of reinforced concrete.
Everything is done, and nothing remains.
A scream, hands that clasp
in a last gesture.
Hyenas spewing benevolence.
From the high poles, seeing in us
an end that we postpone.
Until the next night and
to another, to another, to another...
Before I met him in person,
I already knew who he was.
Parolini is a mythical figure of São Paulo.
He looked like a prophet.
Dressed in an almost
ostentatious way.
Long hair, a huge beard.
He was dressed in some weird clothes.
Franciscan sandals.
People stared at him.
Parolini was avant-garde
before the vanguard.
He was beatnik before beatniks.
Hippie before Hippies.
Whenever it became fashionable,
he had already left.
He had already moved on.
He was a very important figure
in my cultural upbringing.
Especially for Jairo Ferreira.
Of other people too.
You were the first Hippie in Brazil.
When the Hippie movement began,
you were already in another.
You left everybody without
understanding anything.
With you, I did my my time in hell.
I met the visionaries.
The Damned Poets.
Nerval, Blake, Henri Michaux. Poe.
Fernando Pessoa.
Mário de Sá Carneiro.
Baudelaire.
Apollinaire.
"Let's go to Paulinho's house, Paulinho
brought some concrete music stuff."
I had never heard of it.
It was the first time I heard it in my life.
At his house.
Japanese poetry.
He was a guy very connected
to the avant-garde.
A very up-to-date guy.
So much so that he became my friend,
a very good friend of mine.
An actor, and protagonist of my films.
Films like “Amor, palavra prostituta”
or “Império do Desejo”.
And the character in “Alma Corsária”.
I wanted to make a documentary.
How to film Parolini's poetry?
I wanted to make a film about Parolini.
Showing his poetry.
Making the film also from
the point of view of a drifter.
Making, at the same time
a film about São Paulo.
This is what "Sangue Corsário" is about.
For this I used two fictional characters.
It was very funny that, years later,
a very similar encounter happened.
With Jairo and Inácio Araújo,
in the street, a guy arrived
"Carlão, how nice to see you!"
"You are still an artist."
"I am now a banker."
Fuck, but isn't that “Sangue Corsário”?
It was an exact match.
These are two guys who lived
the 1960s intensely.
They meet again in the 1970s,
The film was made in 1979.
It was shot in one week.
Very fast.
Two, three days.
The characters are the poet and the banker.
They are two guys who meet
each other in the Metrópole.
At a spot that Orlando frequented.
At one point, he was known as
the poet of the Metrópole Galleries.
He instituted the poetic
pamphleteering in Brazil
Poet!
He took photocopies of his poems.
And he distributed them on the Viaduto do Chá.
The cops on one side, and Orlando
distributing blasphemous poetry on the other.
Like "Perdição", which he recites there.
Which is a poem about a generation.
I wanted to make a film about Parolini,
but without anyone realizing
that I was making a film about him.
So he plays this character in the film.
And he has this meeting, two guys
who then are friends in the 1980s,
him and Roberto Miranda.
They were my fetish actors.
A banker who meets the poet,
and who ends up doing all the time
an elegy to the poet.
"But you were 20 years ahead!"
You know what I thought was silly
in 1963, when you kept talking about
about atomic bombs.
You were right, man!
Our generation was born
under the sign of the bomb.
That's why your poetry
is visionary and generous.
You anticipated a lot of things.
And always fell out of the picture
when things became fashionable.
When, at the time of the Jovem Guarda
tried to get the bourgeoisie to swallow
a bomb in the White Bear.
You were there.
And you sent your message.
Jorge called you a prophet, remember?
The film ends with him
reciting his poems.
He says the one that is his
most beautiful poem,"Perdição".
Which he talks about
this lost generation.
The first beatnik in Brazil.
I filmed him on top of a van.
With all of São Paulo passing by,
with the wind blowing in his face.
And the guy foaming, crying.
Almost screaming.
His poetry was very visceral.
It's really pamphletary.
Willingly talking about a generation.
1964.
Because I am sorry
I will cover my head with ashes
I will wash my feet with holy water
with shards of tiles I'll scrape the epidermis
because I am repentant
I will fill my mouth with pebbles
I will flog my back
a sackcloth around my waist
the sex will bind
the kidneys cushioning
in cross open arms I will fast
7 days 7 nights
eating unleavened bread of Jews
honey locusts
for I repent
I'll know St. John's Avenue
or Evangelista I don't know
and in the first public square I will undress
I came to bring this strength.
I threw the guy in the middle
of the Praça da Sé.
Reciting poetry in key places of São Paulo.
Only who walks, like me and like him
know well these points of the city.
In the middle of the people
in João Mesquita Square.
This encounter is punctuated by
free praise from the banker.
It is the praise of the guy
who envies this freedom.
You have been through everything.
You did theater, cinema, collage.
Criticism, poetry.
Until, at the end of the film,
the guy gets on his nerves.
"He says, "Damn it, stop bugging me."
"You have to understand something,
it doesn't matter what I did."
"The most important thing is what
I didn't do. What is yet to be done."
I did all those things you said.
The most important is not what I did,
it's what I failed to do.
And what is yet to be done.
And the guy goes one way
and the other, the other way.
And a Rolling Stones song comes on.
"Let it Bleed".
It's the key to the film.
Nothing more counter-cultural
than that ending.
And finally, it records
a period of counterculture.
Paths that were separated and that
meet in the middle of a crossroads.
- Okay, you can go.
Let's start.
Your name, please.
My name is
Carlos Oscar Reichenbach Filho.
I was born in
Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre.
But I came to São Paulo
practically with 4 months.
I was born practically by chance.
A little before my due time.
I was born on
June 14th 1945.
Impressions of that
Rua Tão Augusta, or
(A short introduction to the world
of the "augustiniense man")
It was Luiz Sérgio Persson, as a teacher
who found, from the very first moment
right in the first semester,
I remember very clearly.
He said one day in class,
the only one who's going to be a filmmaker
is going to be that fat guy
with glasses there.
I even looked back!
I didn't think I was fat.
And he said like this,
"if you want your scripts filmed,
learn how to direct."
And that, was the great stimulus
to the art of filmmaking,
It was via Persson.
It was Persson who put it into my head
that I should be a director.
I said to Persson,
"I have a very big problem,
I'm very shy.
I don't like people, I have a problem
in relating to a lot of people."
"But that, you can learn."
"That you can learn."
He was very passionate.
A fantastic figure,
extremely passionate.
"You have to stop being blasé."
Then he discovered that I wasn't blasé,
I was shy.
"You have to go to the street, get drunk,
get some women at the Boca do Lixo."
He was very direct.
He carried everybody to the premieres,
it was a horror.
He carried us to watch
All the Women in the World,
at the previews.
We left at night there
with Dionisio Oliveira.
Both of us stuffing our faces.
Anyway, he said,
"You're going to direct a short film."
That's fine.
"Then we'll start development,
I'll give you some cans of negative.
We'll call Oswaldo Oliveira,
teach you a little bit of photography."
It started out with his team,
to help us.
Glauco Mirko Laurelli
accompanied the editing.
That was the team he worked with.
I told Persson, "I hate documentaries,
I'm not going to do a documentary.
I don't know how to do that."
He would say,
"Yes, you will."
"Do some research.
Take an easy subject,
something Paulista.
Do something nearby."
And so Rua Augusta was born.
"Make a film about Augusta Street."
I don't like documentaries,
nor do I like Augusta Street.
And now I’m going to make
a documentary about Augusta Street...
That's how the documentary was born,
he produced it.
This street is so commercial.
But then I discovered an
absolutely fascinating person.
He was the one who gave me the key
to be able to make this documentary.
It was a figure,
a kind of iconic figure,
those that always interested me,
the marginal figures.
There was a primitivist painter,
who lived in Augusta Street,
exhibiting a painting
absolutely blasphemous.
He was Waldomiro de Deus.
He painted Our Lady in a miniskirt,
Christ in swimwear...
Priests with little boots.
He did a mixture of religious things,
But during the present days.
He used to walk down Augusta Street
wearing a miniskirt!
What a fantastic figure.
And there, in fact, I found the key
to what this film could be.
We were making it with tips,
negative leftovers.
We shot some nonsense
in Augusta Street.
But the things that caught my attention.
We were lying prostrate in Rua Augusta
with the camera stopped,
and then a guy dressed as an Arab appears,
looking like a Tuareg.
On top of a van.
The guy making some signs
down the Rua Augusta.
What an aggressive thing,
what a violent thing.
In that place,
it looked like a scary thing.
Ask the guy to take a turn here,
and we filmed the phenomenal journey
of this strange figure.
This Arab, who should be in Bom Retiro
and not here on Augusta Street.
This figure, drifting there in the middle.
That was going on,
this search for drifting figures.
Let's take the most modern nightclub
of the time, which was Inferninho.
A place where the exceptional
figures of the time would mingle.
There was a crazy queer dancing there,
he was a fantastic figure.
There was an aggressiveness in there,
in the middle of Augusta Street.
A guy mumbling
like a madman in there.
These are the figures for me
that were absolutely fascinating.
The film was made like this,
in that completely
uncharacterized street,
already very mercantilist,
by those figures on the margin.
That's what got me excited about filming.
This film, when seen today
with the proper distance,
is a film about Waldomiro de Deus.
About this difficulty
of rising out of the nest.
This street is so womanly.
The film was made like this,
Saturdays and Sundays, when Persson
made the camera available to us,
the negative ends.
So I centralized the action of the thing
on the stimulus of Waldomiro de Deus.
Who I think was the most
interesting figure in the region.
Absolutely interesting,
who was later to become an icon.
He left, went to France, and has now become
one of our greatest artists.
Of the primitivist painters in Brazil.
The most important.
We stopped filming
and nothing happened.
Then Persson asked,
when are you going to finish this film?
And I said we had no money
to finish the film.
"Then I will raise some money,
so you can finish the film.
But then you'll have to finish it anyway."
This happened a year and a half
after I left the São Luiz School.
After neither he nor I
were at São Luiz.
"But you have to finish it,
there is all the material filmed."
Two years later, I opened a company
called Xanadú Productions,
with Callegaro and Antônio Lima.
I said, "Lima, come here.
Take a look at my material,
and help me write a text,
as official as possible."
We are going to make a documentary
like Primo Carbonari.
That was the contradiction of the thing...
it was not in a mocking way.
It was like a parallel reading
to those images that were filmed.
I was editing with Jovita Pereira Dias
who had been Glauco's assistant.
We didn't have the money
to pay an editor of that caliber.
So we took the assistant,
Jovita was the one who rode with me.
I was editing Audácia!
my episode in that film,
"The Balladissima of the Tropics
X The Sex Picks".
Which you screened.
"Jovita, come finish the film,
because Persson is on my leg
and I have to finish it."
I made a quick arrangement with her.
Because the film ended up
winning the first State Government
competition for short films,
which still exists today.
Do you know what it is?
We were the first class to get it,
plus the post-production.
So I was able to pay Jovita,
pay the lab, you know?
I remember asking,
"I want to get the narrator
with the most powerful voice.
Who is Primo Carbonari's narrator?
Ah, Oswaldo Calfat.
Is he there?
Then call Oswaldo Calfat."
Oswaldo came to read the text,
and I said:
"Read this in the most institutional
way as possible."
The elegant stores,
the high commerce,
the sophistication,
the elegance of the people.
They make this street
the place where you mix
eccentric types,
not always of the upper bourgeoisie,
with their usual occupation.
Window shopping.
Keeping up with fashion.
Not always buying.
Having tea.
Meeting Ricardo
with his new girlfriend.
The movie takes this tone.
Which is a tone of irony.
It gets more serious as
towards the end.
And it sets the idea when
Waldomiro de Deus leaves Brazil.
I think, in a certain way,
the end of Esta Rua tão Augusta
defines the end of my next films.
They all end with people leaving.
If they don't end, in a certain way they
define themselves by people leaving.
On June 15, 1969,
Waldomiro de Deus traveled to Europe.
Taking as luggage his
irreverent painting.
I myself underestimated this film
for many years.
I regarded it as a chance film.
It had no importance.
And it ended up taking on an importance,
not for me, but because
it is perhaps one of the few
documents about this region,
at that time.
For me its importance, was in being
somewhat premonitory
in relation to the disappearance
of these exceptional figures.
It's very difficult today for you
to find such a persona.
Interesting personas and,
at the same time,
as drifting as Waldomiro de Deus.
This indifferent street.
To the painter, to the painter's paintings.
To the mini-skirt of the painter.
To the painter's life.
To the painter's friends.
This street that snobs
the painter's painting.
A painter who paints
Christs in miniskirts.
Saints in monokinis.
Popes in shorts.
Friars wearing modern boots.
Parties in heaven and on earth.
You will see the result
of nine months of work,
spent in the creation of the great
cinematographic impact of the year.
LILIAN M.
Lilian M. is what I consider
my second feature film.
Until 1970,
I had made two episodes
and two feature films.
Alice in "As Libertinas" and
"As Baladíssimas dos Trópicos"
X As Picaretas do Sexo, in "Audácia!"
Which I don't think are feature films,
they are episodes.
They are almost short films.
I didn't define...
I always say that, for me,
at that moment,
especially after I left São Luiz,
life and cinema are very mixed.
I thought that living was
more important than making films.
Experimenting.
In August, 1974,
in the studios of Jota Filmes,
director Carlos Reichenbach
and his team
were looking for the ideal actress for
the title role of their new film.
I became partner in an
advertising production company.
The advertising service Jota Filmes.
Which has an interesting practical side.
Good. Nice.
It gave me a lot of technical practice.
It was the moment when I refined
my knowledge as a cinematographer.
When I started at São Luiz
I didn't know how to deal with people properly.
I learned this in practice,
especially working with teams.
Leading teams.
Sometimes as a director,
sometimes as a director of photography.
Commanding teams,
I learned the delights of a drifter's life.
Of community life.
And bringing into practice
a bit of my world's political vision.
How, in fact, to take the whole
anarcho-libertarian character,
the libertarian thought, and bring it
to coexistence, to daily life.
To experience it on a daily basis.
The practice of putting order
without being noticed.
Without it becoming a fetter,
an unpleasant thing.
And advertising was the first world
in which I could not bring
this notion into my daily life.
Lilian M.
I had wanted to make a film,
a few years earlier
that would be a kind of a Justine,
that would start from this idea
of a woman who
passed from hand to hand,
that would transform herself
as she passed through each man.
As if she took the diary
of a chambermaid.
It had a bit of a Buñuelesque
thing going on.
But it was still a project,
not developed as a script.
As always, I start first
at the treatment, or pre-script level,
where things start to be defined.
But one thing I have been stimulating
from very early on
even in my screenwriting courses,
that is never to worry
developing the pre-script.
without focusing on the dialogues
in order not to waste time.
Which is a very curious thing.
Because, for example, "Lilian M."
won the award for best screenplay
and it is a film that in truth
had no script, it had a pre-script.
Just like "Anjos do Arrabalde",
a kind of crazy thing.
Films that won
the Best Screenplay Award,
and were shot with a pre-script.
Well defined in the pre-script.
I defined the whole episode.
I knew what conditions I had,
and I had to write
for those conditions.
I know that it is a film
that will be made in blocks.
This week I have this negative
and this crew to shoot.
The next week and so on...
So the first block,
is this woman in the countryside.
The second block is her coexistence
with the industrialist.
The third block is her coexistence
with the torturer.
And it was developed this way.
And it was filmed this way too.
I filmed for five days,
and stopped for three, four weeks.
Then I would come back.
What did I need?
I needed an actress.
I needed an actress
who would be at my disposal
during those two, three, four months
that I was going to shoot the film.
And that was the big search that I went for.
On the recommendation of
my old friend and colleague,
actor in"As Libertinas",
José Carlos Cardoso,
also an actor in "A Mulher de Todos".
Theater actress Celia Olga Benvenutti
was the only candidate who fulfilled
all the requirements for the role.
He told me about an actress
who was considered
one of the best students
at the school of dramatic art,
Celia Olga Benvenutti.
I said okay, but I wanted to
do some tests with her.
I had already understood that
to make that film, I had to do everything.
Be a photographer,
camera operator, etc and so on.
This film was made with a
leftover family inheritance.
Leftover negative material.
I wanted to hire this woman,
do the tests and so on.
And then I realized really
I had a gold nugget in my hand.
Are you a little nervous, Miss...?
Lilian.
Would you like a cigarette?
- No, thank you.
- Please, this will calm you down.
I had to have a genius actress.
Although for the male characters,
I have actors in the film.
What I essentially wanted
was to work with a few guys.
The German industrialist, for example,
was a film director
and director of photography,
Edward Freund.
And the guy who played the salesman
was an actor,
but essentially a voice actor, in Eliot Ness,
in Robert Stack's "The Untouchables".
The business today, my dear,
is land, land, real estate.
Wilson Ribeiro, excellent.
I called an almost relative,
he was practically raised as a cousin,
a person with whom I sympathized,
who got along well with my parents,
Benjamin Cattan.
A great friend.
I called Benjamin to do the industrial.
I would rather have a thug at home
than a dancer son.
It was the stepmother's fault.
The guy who plays the farmer,
was one of the best
camera assistants in São Paulo,
who should be an actor,
was Caçador Guerreiro.
With Walter Marins,
Wilson Ribeiro,
with Cattan,
you could be more explicit
in a certain sense.
I used to ask, really exaggerate things.
I remember speaking
with Walter Martins,
"Now you are Zé Trindade.
"Now I am talking to a guy
who likes chanchada."
Who is an actor with an eminently
Brechtian formation.
So you can have a
completely different relationship.
One that extrapolates.
- Did you rent?
- I rented.
But you have to buy.
- Money is never left over.
- But it has to.
What a beautiful chuchu orchard.
Chuchu!
It is a sign, not a character,
it's a sign.
Now mix it with chanchada.
We are going to go crazy for real here.
Let's become Zé Trindade.
Where are the women!
Where are the women, get it?
That debauched thing.
Where is Mr. Jose?
He's not here, young man.
He’s really not here?
No, sir.
There are actors who are
essentially movie actors,
like Sergio Hingst.
Would you move in with me?
Will you take care of life?
If you promise
not to impregnate me.
But I want to have children.
I'd give them my name.
You're such a poor man.
Come here.
Biáfora's favorite actor,
who has this image
that makes a big impression,
which is Biáfora's room.
That underling,
the civil servant
par excellence.
The subservient figure,
almost mediocre that,
at the same time, has a strength.
In contrast with the
wonderful character,
who is the extraordinary actress,
Maracy Mello.
Maracy Mello was an actress
essentially of cinema.
An actress with a cinema discipline.
Who also had this strength.
She had to have something kind of...
She was a character who worked a lot
the question of death.
She had a physical connection with death.
It was essential to find
an almost Japanese actress.
With a transparency, right?
A translucence.
I really wanted
this character of the sister
of the civil servant
to be this link to dead things.
That it was a character that suddenly
is being calcified along with the house.
But at the same time she doesn't age.
She keeps her features
as if she were still a girl.
Those almost youthful features.
In the eyes you can see a maturity,
but the rest of her features are as if
she was preserved in formaldehyde.
Especially the texts are too long,
it had to have a mournful tone.
As if on the outside she is fine with life
but inside she is dead.
There was strange warmth that, sometimes,
in the late afternoon, appeared.
The prayers that my late aunt
on her deathbed,
before she stopped believing in God.
To drive away the devil.
Of the bricks that looked like bones.
A character who had
a fascist nostalgia, the industrialist,
who had an anguish for death.
And another who has a fascination with it.
Without being an obvious thing.
I think this was something
that the actors also brought.
That was the essential choice.
I remember it was fascinating
to film this, too.
The assistants were absolutely
fascinated by that character.
Walking through the house
as if she was an apparition.
And the house is really hers,
The other one feels more and more
on the margins of that house.
That was an essential thing in the film.
She was a stranger in there,
a stranger who remains
a stranger until the end.
Until they sting each other,
in which she says that
she doesn't belong in this world.
If I belong, I'll become a zombie.
Like this woman
so young and so dead.
The good actor doesn't hunch,
the good actor gives you an allowance.
An extra to work with.
He doesn't go the other way.
He takes your path
and goes forward.
He doesn't back down,
nor does he go sideways.
I think that this is a collaboration.
When I was a cinematographer
I was very conscious of this.
I didn't go filming for myself.
I always tried to find
the chromatic taste of the client.
I would show films, pictures, paintings.
"Do you like this blue?
Is it the blue you imagined?"
I filmed the first part, the whole part
involving her on the farm,
and at the end of the film also,
which goes around.
Then we shot the Cattan part,
then we filmed the part
of the German industrialist,
and finally the part with Sérgio Hingst.
That was the last part, inclusive.
The last segment.
And as we were filming,
me and Inácio Araújo...
Inácio Araújo was the editor of the film,
and a great friend of mine.
He started working in editing
as an assistant.
The first film he made
as an editing assistant
was "Corrida em Busca do Amor".
In that period we became very good friends.
We would take the film,
shoot the first part
and already pre-edited it.
So if you miss something
you would still have time to do it.
The creation of the film does not end
at the end of the shooting.
Even on the last day of mixing
I can change the whole film.
I am open to tinkering
with the whole film.
If it's necessary.
The editor, for me
is not just a complement,
it is an essential part.
For me, perhaps the second
most important thing in a film.
This is the moment when I need
a person of extreme confidence.
A person in whom I trust completely.
To tell me, too much is too much.
It's either too little or too much.
Inácio used to say,
we wrote many scripts together,
that, in fact, his function
was to bring me down to earth.
“Let Carlão fly and
I'll pull him down when he starts.”
“If I let him, he'll go.”
You don't want to change that name?
How about Paula?
I don't like it.
Alice.
Horrible.
How about Silvia?
No.
What was your mother's name?
My mother? Lilian.
No, not that one.
You're not going to name yourself Lilian.
There were some great things that
were never included in the film.
In the final cut of the film.
The participation of Jairo Ferreira
was remarkable.
He played a sailor.
He played a sailor who spoke
with an onomatopoeic language.
He spoke only in noises.
As he did that language
subtitles would come in.
As if it were a translation
of another language.
That was a wonderful idea,
that later... This was filmed!
At that time they didn't make
a colored editing copy.
The films were edited
in black and white.
You only saw the color film
when the first copy came out.
The only thing that you,
as a cinematographer, received
were two frames from each scene.
These were guides with which
you had control over the film.
It was very crazy.
Because of this there were
very curious things that happened.
Which obviously had
to be solved during editing.
There was a set that
was set up in the studio,
for which called a motel decorator.
"Decorate this here like
if it were a nice motel."
A lot of the industrialist part
was filmed on this set.
I already had the bathroom ready,
so we tinkered with the set.
We were filming with advertising junk.
I needed those scenes.
Those four years of torture,
of coexistence, taught me
how to deal with the structure of a studio.
The last script decisions
were made according
to the resources I had.
So a lot of things, for example...
When I had a great actor,
a guy who could memorize
a text like no one else,
like Cattan,
a trained actor like him,
I would put a text in his hand.
These texts were sometimes
defined overnight.
Because what I found provocative
was to have an almost minimalist character,
who almost doesn't speak,
a female character,
who lets herself be involved
in the male discourse.
The film starts with a woman
who doesn't talk with her husband.
She works, fucks, sleeps,
wakes up, works...
They have that dynamic,
they don't talk,
they touch each other with their clothes on,
they have sex with clothes on.
The husband doesn't know his wife's body.
He gets to know it in the end,
she is the one who subverts it.
When that guy arrives talking nonstop,
that traveling salesman.
Then, obviously, I got a good actor,
Walter Marins.
An actor with an academic background.
Then I said, detonate the text here.
I'll give you the lines inside,
but you improvise.
I couldn't define it.
There was a certain moment,
which was great,
now you will have
to make a synthesis,
of the fascination of capitalism.
Then I took an informative text,
like real estate banking.
Memorize this here.
The synthesis of capitalist brutality.
But of course it will get better.
Now, because of the treatment
that you have given me,
I'm really not going to leave here
without selling you something.
- I'm not buying anything.
- But you don't have to worry.
You give a small part in
small part in cash.
And the rest in chuchu.
There were things that were added
at the time of the shooting.
For example,
I thought that the famous
Ruy Barbosa's famous speech
was a synthesis, you know?
I still know this text today.
I got a book to get to
know this text better.
The text that made this guy
the best orator of the country.
This guy in the sauna pissing off
everybody that is next to him.
Memorize this text, speak this text,
while stretching here,
waiting to be served.
"No!
Brazil is not the clubbing, gambling
and of pandering to the livestock farmers,
who have seized its fortune,
and want to treat it the way libertinism
treats the momentary
companions of their lust."
No!
Brazil is not this collective
collective gathering of perverted creatures,
that you can run over,
without the slightest impression,
the breath of the aspirations
that agitate humanity.
No!
Brazil is not this nationality
cold, delirious, cadaverous
Which receives on its forehead
the stamp of a clique.
As the tattoo of the lover,
or the chalet, on the back,
the fleur-de-lis of the executioner.
That's a text I've memorized.
It was done overnight.
I had to have actors who knew
how to memorize the text.
That was by meter.
I wanted the character of Cattan
to be an industrialist in crisis.
An Industrialist with a crisis of conscience.
What's worse...
Who does the whole surplus value speech.
In our case, for example,
despite our philanthropy.
Of our voluntary contributions,
of our civic spirit.
We put in a great part of our effort
working for the national economy.
The nation works thanks to
to our financial funds.
And leave some characters
extremely laconic.
The German Industrialist, for example,
he hardly speaks.
He only says slurs in German.
I dubbed them, by the way,
because I couldn't
afford a German dubber.
But how I have heard this
during my whole life.
I just kept repeating it.
Did you sign any papers,
any documents?
Yes, including some deeds.
And then you took some?
I made the down payment.
I told you not to sign anything,
not to pay anything.
But what am I going to do?
He is irresistible.
What is the book that synthesizes
modern consumerist thought?
The philosophy of getting along.
Something that already
bothered at that time.
Indisputably, Dale Carnegie.
"How to Make Friends
and Influence People."
So I took a summary of that book,
I did it overnight.
And I gave it to Wilson Ribeiro,
"Are you happy?
Being happy is an art.
Being happy is like tanning leather,
polishing a diamond..."
The bullshit that is in this book
that sold more than potato water.
More than rice and parties.
The question of so-called positive thinking.
- Are you happy?
- Once in a while.
Being happy is an art.
And you have to practice it.
Being happy is like tanning leather,
polishing a diamond...
And the way to deal with it consists in...
It became
an accumulation of ideologies.
And this woman going
from man to man.
Until she fell into the hands of a bureaucrat.
A civil servant.
Everything regulated inside,
who has a strange coexistence
with his morbid sister.
That woman who leanerd a lot and
went through everything on this journey,
with every man she lived
a borderline experience,
this woman returns to the farm.
She comes back to see her husband's body.
She makes her husband discover his body
and then takes the road again.
Because she can't stay there.
We were going through
a period of censorship.
Very though.
What I feared the censorship
was going to cut
was on the character of the German.
There was no parameter
with the censorship.
And you agreed with all this, Lilian?
But I didn't understand these things.
At that time I thought that a trick,
should be paid with a bigger one.
Do you remember, man?
We covered it.
That industrialist who disappeared.
Yeah, Hartman disappeared.
Funny how time
makes us forget things.
That character was totally inspired
inspired by Henning Albert Boilesen.
A German who finances
the torture apparatus in Brazil.
I could only show that as a metaphor.
Otherwise the film would be
banned immediately.
But it was a very clear metaphor.
I had spectators who had passed
by his hands and said, "That's Boilesen."
For anyone who knew the figure,
it's crystal clear.
Although Boilesen doesn't appear,
there is no mention of DOPS or anything.
There is a certain moment that...
I didn't film it outside the DOPS
because it was too blatant.
The German industrialist orders
the torture of the squatter inside.
Any good connoisseur
will understand that.
Don't do this to me, no!
Orson Welles said that he couldn't
separate politics from crime.
I have a more of a Marcusian view.
I couldn't separate politics from sex.
I film the body to show the soul.
I think "Lilian M." is a summary of this.
Seen today it is even a prudish film.
I didn't dare that much.
Maybe the most daring sequence,
not from a political point of view,
but in terms of nudity,
is the orgy with the father and son.
With the mistress in bed.
In fact, it is a lesson
the boy teaches his father.
It's a really aggressive thing,
it was on purpose.
It was meant to shock, to punch
the audience in the stomach.
But it is the only moment
that I feel in the film
that censorship could touch or not,
and it did.
12 years later,
the BBC in London
bans the torture part.
What...
What did they do?
With me?
My morals!
Where are my morals!
My morals!
It made sense deep down
to work with metaphors.
Although they were clear metaphors,
but they were metaphors.
For example, the prostitution class
is not a prostitution class.
It is a dance class.
Now you are going to learn
those Latin rhythms.
The conga!
And I don't know what else.
It is time for Brazil to play
the Hawaiian rhythm.
The most ridiculous thing ever.
The two women in Hawaiian clothes,
with the notion that this is Brazil.
More metaphorical
than that is impossible.
The musical vision is already
there in advance.
I shoot thinking with the music.
I didn't do this in
"Corrida em Busca do Amor".
Because I didn't have the conditions for it.
But when I made "Lilian M."
half of the film was shot with the music.
Live and in color.
Jairo Ferreira used to say
something very funny.
"Carlão makes films to exorcise the hundreds
of records he inherited from his father."
It was all filmed with playback.
There was no direct sound.
Everything was filmed with playback.
Half of the film was shot with playback.
Half of the film.
I took a Nagra there
and released the music on the spot.
I would use a Nagra, a little sound box.
And we film like that. Why?
Actually, I learned very early on,
especially with "Lilian M."
where I could put that into practice,
is that even my chief machinist
did great travelling shots.
And I love a travelling shot.
Cinema is travelling for me.
He does it within the rhythm.
So the truth is that since
"Corrida em Busca do Amor"
many sequences have been conceived
in the relationship between
image and soundtrack.
There is a whole sequence
that I made sure to do
almost as a joke
with the ending of "O Anjo Nasceu"
by Julio Bressane.
The guy has just closed
a deal with this woman.
He sells her a
squatted piece of land.
He goes out dancing with her,
gets in the car, drives away.
He goes to Conchinchina.
The music goes on and on and on.
If you that the music out
that scene becomes unbearable.
But it was filmed with that music.
It had to end with the last chord.
Because the rhythm of the music
determines the tempo of the scene.
It's the movement of the music.
Optical sound had its limitations.
At the time of the mix,
some sounds disappeared.
That is, it was recorded, it was mixed.
For example, the scene of the crash
between the car and the truck.
I never heard that sound.
Because in the optic that sound was gone.
The sound was so loud,
that it exceeded the limit of the optical.
When you took the magnetic
and transported it to the optical,
you put a limit.
We put a limiter.
Anything that goes past that limiter,
it cuts out.
It doesn't register.
Until today I never heard the crash.
It's that the music comes on top,
that's what saved the scene.
Dona Maria, he's a criminal!
Your husband is a scoundrel.
An asshole.
A piece of shit who doesn't
understand anything about life.
- Your husband is a lowlife.
- Shut up!
Shut up, you're dead,
I'm in charge here.
Now, who's ever seen a man
let his children go hungry.
He's a turd.
Shut up!
Who are you to tell me to shut up?
Shut up, you're dead!
I'm in charge here.
José!
José!
Dona Maria, don't do this, for God's sake.
I want to go away.
I want my children.
I want to go away.
The biggest influence for this film,
comes from the Japanese directors.
This film, in fact...
What moved me to make this film
was my passion for Shohei Imamura.
And other Japanese filmmakers,
like Eizō Sugawa
Who are filmmakers of reference,
of my background.
But it was Shohei Imamura especially.
With "Insect Woman", "Secrets of a Wife"...
And a director, who was considered one of the
most feminine directors in Japanese cinema,
Yoshio Yoshida.
And also Yasuzo Massumura.
Yasuzo Massumura made films
about the feminine universe,
especially the universe of women
exploited by men.
Prostitutes, factory workers, etc.
There was this thing of seeking
the maximum dignity in these lives.
Based on an economic
and carnal aspect.
Massumura said something fantastic,
that guided "Lilian M." a lot.
There is one thing that
we cannot forget, he said.
That greatly influences
the feminine vision of the world.
More than in men,
in the feminine experience,
in all important female experience,
blood is present.
The menstruation, the birth,
the abortion, you know?
Very curious to think about that.
Only a Japanese to think about it.
This was kind of defining for me in the film.
More than the question of desire,
evidently I'm talking about it and of the body,
the discovery of the body.
This character gradually discovers that
little by little she has a body.
That this body is also part of her, even if
she has not perceived clearly,
it was already part of
her connection with the farmer.
This guilty relationship with the body.
That it becomes explicit in this
coexistence with other men.
At some moments, being used even
as a guinea pig in torture experiments.
There's a line where she literally says,
"Two shocks, two checks."
Everything comes in with
a money relationship in between.
She goes from
luxury prostitution to the streets.
But she always comes out with
integrity of these relationships.
That's the greatness of Massumura's films.
This dive into experience.
This is nothing new in this film for me.
The character in "Alma Corsária"
is similar to Lilian.
The poet in "Alma Corsária" is just like Lilian.
He gets into every problem
in the movie, to learn more.
That is the keynote of several other films.
The blonde in "Falsa Loura".
The mixed-race girl in "Garotas do ABC".
These are characters that get involved
without fear of making a mistake.
And did the box office do well?
At that time, there was something
that was essential for the existence of the
of the so-called average Brazilian cinema.
That was the additional box-office prize.
The film had more than 500 thousand spectators.
What any average Brazilian film
did at the time.
Any average Brazilian film
in the 1970s had 500,000 viewers.
But for me, the first financial return came
by that additional box-office prize.
Because any film that did up to
500 thousand spectators received it.
I lived on that Additional Box Office
for practically two years.
Films that did at least 500,000,
because you had films that did 6 million.
You have two movies that did that.
Yes, yes.
You don't have much comparison
today in relation to this.
Doing 500,000
spectators at the time
is today more than a million.
Deep down, you don't have
many parameters of comparison.
I repeat, the ticket cost
the same as a bus ticket.
The C class frequented
Brazilian cinema with assiduity.
And that's what ended.
"Lilian M. Confissões amorosas,
relatório confidencial"
Nothing was forbidden to her.
And she knew and dared
everything.
Don't miss it.
Carlão, what about the
short films you released?
All Brazilian short films
had to accompany a foreign film.
The choices were very crazy.
Everybody was waiting that their
short film would go with a Spielberg.
A short that, I don't know,
would be with Empire of the Sun.
And there was a profit,
the films were profitable.
So that's why some producers
began to produce short films.
And then I was invited by Galante
to make some short films.
"Don't you want to make some short films?"
“Sonhos de Vida”.
“Sangue Corsário”
“Nem verdade nem mentira”.
And “M da minha Mão”.
The “M da minha Mão” I don't call it a film,
I call it a filmed testimony.
Mário Gennari Filho,
what was your first success?
"Casinha pequenina",
in Baião rhythm.
When was it recorded?
1950.
Can you tell me
who is the author of this song?
This music is public domain.
Unknown author.
Mário Gennari Filho was a composer
fundamental in my childhood.
Mine and Jairo Ferreira's childhood.
It was also a childhood in the periphery,
periphery of the time.
I was raised in Jabaquara.
Jabaquara at the time
was understood as periphery.
And I used to go to the
amusement park in the periphery
I used to go to amusement parks
that had a huge loudspeaker.
"João offers to Mariazinha from the pharmacy,
the "M da minha Mão", by Mário Gennari Filho."
It was a song of my childhood.
And of my life in the periphery,
for many years.
Not only that music, but especially
the accordion instrument.
The instrument that made
so successful in the 1950s
and was despised in the 1960s.
The accordion is Luiz Gonzaga's
instrument, let's not forget.
You can never despise it.
Talking with Nelson
in one of those debates
that the greatest influence he had in his life
was Luiz Gonzaga. For me too.
I spent my whole childhood listening to
Luiz Gonzaga, Mário Gennari Filho, Mário Zan.
The accordion was the instrument
that was part of my childhood.
It is part of all my films.
All my films have at least one song
played on an accordion.
The accordion was the instrument
that was part of my education.
- What kind of audience you had?
- The youth.
The youth of that time.
Maybe the youth now
no longer accept this.
At that time it was hit music.
I wanted to detect what was
the atmosphere of his compositions.
At that time, all kinds of audiences
liked this music.
There was no rock, no disco,
nothing like that.
So the youth loved this kind of music,
Bolero, Baião...
"M da minha Mão"
is a filmed testimony.
Because of Jairo Ferreira.
The conception is mine,
but the interviewer is Jairo.
I was filming.
He asks a lot of questions.
What was the first success...
In fact, Mário Gennari Filho became known
as a musician and performer,
playing "A Casinha Pequenina".
- Can we hear a little piece?
- Of course.
He composed some classics
of that time, like "Baião Caçula".
"Velho Romance."
And "M da minha Mão",
which made a big impression on me.
So I made a point
to buy the rights to the song
when I went to do "Dois Córregos".
In "Dois Córregos" the record even appears.
It is a tribute.
It's been almost 30 years, do you
still remember "M da minha Mão"?
Yes, how can I not?
It is the only document that exists about
this great Paulista composer.
That is Mário Gennari Filho.
Who composed some of the most beautiful
and essential pieces of the Brazilian chorinho.
"Baião Caçula" is a classic.
And I managed to record it
while he was still alive.
It didn't win the short film certificate
because Mário Gennari appears
playing in a nightclub.
I wanted to show him today, alive.
So at the end of the film there is a thanks
to the restaurant where he was a partner.
There is no publicity, The name
of the restaurant doesn't appear.
Everything was a reason
for them to veto it.
And that is why the film
was never shown in theaters.
It was never seen.
His son and daughter
have never seen the film.
I met his children,
when I released "Dois Córregos".
When did the accordion start to become
become an outdated instrument?
About 15 years ago.
More or less.
Although I think
it is coming back again.
What are the reasons for this?
The reasons for coming back?
Today they are creating new sounds.
The accordion has been for a long time
without having any opportunity.
Today the accordion has something
that can be taken advantage of.
If there is something important about this film,
it is that it is the only record of Mario Gennari alive.
Active,
and performing his pearls.
Perhaps "Sangue Corsário" is the first film
made in Brazil about the counterculture.
Bringing out the beatnik poetry.
The avant-garde poetry.
The blasphemous poetry,
the strong poetry,
of a great friend.
The poet Orlando Parolini.
He was an actor in some of my films.
As well as theater actor. Playwright.
He had a theater group that was very
connected to the dramaturgy of Ionesco.
To the theater of the absurd.
In fact, the group was called Ab Surdo.
A whole life hanging.
Galleries of reinforced concrete.
Everything is done, and nothing remains.
A scream, hands that clasp
in a last gesture.
Hyenas spewing benevolence.
From the high poles, seeing in us
an end that we postpone.
Until the next night and
to another, to another, to another...
Before I met him in person,
I already knew who he was.
Parolini is a mythical figure of São Paulo.
He looked like a prophet.
Dressed in an almost
ostentatious way.
Long hair, a huge beard.
He was dressed in some weird clothes.
Franciscan sandals.
People stared at him.
Parolini was avant-garde
before the vanguard.
He was beatnik before beatniks.
Hippie before Hippies.
Whenever it became fashionable,
he had already left.
He had already moved on.
He was a very important figure
in my cultural upbringing.
Especially for Jairo Ferreira.
Of other people too.
You were the first Hippie in Brazil.
When the Hippie movement began,
you were already in another.
You left everybody without
understanding anything.
With you, I did my my time in hell.
I met the visionaries.
The Damned Poets.
Nerval, Blake, Henri Michaux. Poe.
Fernando Pessoa.
Mário de Sá Carneiro.
Baudelaire.
Apollinaire.
"Let's go to Paulinho's house, Paulinho
brought some concrete music stuff."
I had never heard of it.
It was the first time I heard it in my life.
At his house.
Japanese poetry.
He was a guy very connected
to the avant-garde.
A very up-to-date guy.
So much so that he became my friend,
a very good friend of mine.
An actor, and protagonist of my films.
Films like “Amor, palavra prostituta”
or “Império do Desejo”.
And the character in “Alma Corsária”.
I wanted to make a documentary.
How to film Parolini's poetry?
I wanted to make a film about Parolini.
Showing his poetry.
Making the film also from
the point of view of a drifter.
Making, at the same time
a film about São Paulo.
This is what "Sangue Corsário" is about.
For this I used two fictional characters.
It was very funny that, years later,
a very similar encounter happened.
With Jairo and Inácio Araújo,
in the street, a guy arrived
"Carlão, how nice to see you!"
"You are still an artist."
"I am now a banker."
Fuck, but isn't that “Sangue Corsário”?
It was an exact match.
These are two guys who lived
the 1960s intensely.
They meet again in the 1970s,
The film was made in 1979.
It was shot in one week.
Very fast.
Two, three days.
The characters are the poet and the banker.
They are two guys who meet
each other in the Metrópole.
At a spot that Orlando frequented.
At one point, he was known as
the poet of the Metrópole Galleries.
He instituted the poetic
pamphleteering in Brazil
Poet!
He took photocopies of his poems.
And he distributed them on the Viaduto do Chá.
The cops on one side, and Orlando
distributing blasphemous poetry on the other.
Like "Perdição", which he recites there.
Which is a poem about a generation.
I wanted to make a film about Parolini,
but without anyone realizing
that I was making a film about him.
So he plays this character in the film.
And he has this meeting, two guys
who then are friends in the 1980s,
him and Roberto Miranda.
They were my fetish actors.
A banker who meets the poet,
and who ends up doing all the time
an elegy to the poet.
"But you were 20 years ahead!"
You know what I thought was silly
in 1963, when you kept talking about
about atomic bombs.
You were right, man!
Our generation was born
under the sign of the bomb.
That's why your poetry
is visionary and generous.
You anticipated a lot of things.
And always fell out of the picture
when things became fashionable.
When, at the time of the Jovem Guarda
tried to get the bourgeoisie to swallow
a bomb in the White Bear.
You were there.
And you sent your message.
Jorge called you a prophet, remember?
The film ends with him
reciting his poems.
He says the one that is his
most beautiful poem,"Perdição".
Which he talks about
this lost generation.
The first beatnik in Brazil.
I filmed him on top of a van.
With all of São Paulo passing by,
with the wind blowing in his face.
And the guy foaming, crying.
Almost screaming.
His poetry was very visceral.
It's really pamphletary.
Willingly talking about a generation.
1964.
Because I am sorry
I will cover my head with ashes
I will wash my feet with holy water
with shards of tiles I'll scrape the epidermis
because I am repentant
I will fill my mouth with pebbles
I will flog my back
a sackcloth around my waist
the sex will bind
the kidneys cushioning
in cross open arms I will fast
7 days 7 nights
eating unleavened bread of Jews
honey locusts
for I repent
I'll know St. John's Avenue
or Evangelista I don't know
and in the first public square I will undress
I came to bring this strength.
I threw the guy in the middle
of the Praça da Sé.
Reciting poetry in key places of São Paulo.
Only who walks, like me and like him
know well these points of the city.
In the middle of the people
in João Mesquita Square.
This encounter is punctuated by
free praise from the banker.
It is the praise of the guy
who envies this freedom.
You have been through everything.
You did theater, cinema, collage.
Criticism, poetry.
Until, at the end of the film,
the guy gets on his nerves.
"He says, "Damn it, stop bugging me."
"You have to understand something,
it doesn't matter what I did."
"The most important thing is what
I didn't do. What is yet to be done."
I did all those things you said.
The most important is not what I did,
it's what I failed to do.
And what is yet to be done.
And the guy goes one way
and the other, the other way.
And a Rolling Stones song comes on.
"Let it Bleed".
It's the key to the film.
Nothing more counter-cultural
than that ending.
And finally, it records
a period of counterculture.
Paths that were separated and that
meet in the middle of a crossroads.